Alpine Linux

Reader supplied reviews for Alpine Linux Average rating 8.7 from 39 review(s) Please specify which version of the distribtion you are reviewing. Please select a rating in the range of 1-10. Please write at least a few sentences about the distribution while limiting your review to 4080 characters. What are your thoughts on Alpine Linux? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- 3.21.33.20.63.19.73.18.123.17.103.16.93.15.113.14.103.13.123.12.113.10.63.6.23.2.22.7.81.10.6 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: 3.21.3 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-02-17 Votes: 15 Alpine Linux is hands down the best distribution I've ever used. After two years of relentless distro-hopping and trying nearly every distro out there, I finally discovered Alpine and fell in love. Now, all of my machines run it, and I couldn't be happier. Alpine excels in versatility—it's perfect for gaming, schoolwork, web browsing, and more. With over 25,000 packages available in its repositories, it offers a lightweight yet an amazing and powerful experience. The only drawback I've encountered is its hardware compatibility; it doesn't support NVIDIA systems, which prompted me to build a new PC to fully enjoy its benefits. In terms of performance, I've found Alpine to be on par with, if not better than, CachyOS and Gentoo based on my experience. I highly recommend giving Alpine Linux a try Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 3.21.0 Rating: 6 Date: 2024-12-31 Votes: 8 At first, I fell in love with Alpine Linux. It used less RAM, was fast (it booted in a few seconds), and my experience with apk was pleasant. After trying it on physical hardware for a month or so though after getting bored of using Arch, I encountered many issues and had to make a bunch of compromises (which will be listed below). Some general information before we get into this: I have a pretty beefy computer, with a 9900k, 1050 Ti, and 32GB of RAM, and I also was using the alpha channel for packages. At the time (around two months ago), I was obsessed with making my computer use the lowest amount of memory possible. What was great: * apk was fast, and easy to use (best package manager I have come across) * Booted in a few seconds * Consistently used less than 1GB of memory with a bunch of programs open, without any (just my desktop) 250MB (got as low as 154MB with 9wm). * Used next to no storage What wasn't all that great: * Nouveau didn't work at all (X11 would refuse to start) * Setting up even integrated graphics was a hassle and took nearly an entire week for me to figure out * I was starting on C#, but sadly I could not install any programs (or vim language servers) which provided syntax highlighting and feedback (such as VSCodium) so I had to go without it * Minecraft (which I only really use for graphical testing these days), would not launch beyond version 1.18.2 * Occasionally, my monitor would start flashing as if the refresh rate was configured incorrectly when set to 60hz * As an extension to that, at 165hz the screen was weirdly dimmed, and at 144hz everything was fine * A pretty major one right off the bat: the installer wouldn't boot, so I had to install Alpine completely manually from Arch. It was for sure a cumbersome experience! * On top of all of that though, Alpine has a nearly nonexistent support community. Due to that, I had to figure out how to either solve my problems, or make less functional compromises. After this experience, I went back to Arch. I definitely miss apk and everything I liked about Alpine, but the issues I had were simply too major for me to stay. I personally am giving Alpine a 6/10 as I very much enjoyed everything but the issues I had with it. If this was on a VM though, I would have definitely given it a 10/10! Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 3.20.3 Rating: 9 Date: 2024-10-20 Votes: 121 Alpine works pretty much out of the box in an OpenBSD vmm virtual machine is not true for most Linux distros. It boots quicker than just about any Linux I have ever seen and being very minimal it runs Firefox acceptably fast over ssh on a OpenBSD host. It boots faster and runs Firefox much faster than an OpenBSD guest on VMM. Chrome is close to same speed on both though and slower for some reason on Alpine. Would give 10 out of 10 but it doesn't come with a RBAC system out of the tin. Also haven't run it on bare metal. Perfect for resource liteish vm environments though. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 39 reader reviews of Alpine Linux...